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by Bob Evans

Politicians continue to run scared of religious voter say Swiss Freethinkers

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Swiss voters are faced with lists from more than a dozen political parties in the 23 October elections for a new parliament, including a group in Zurich that makes Switzerland part of a worldwide trend: voters in the city will for the first time in Switzerland’s history have the chance to cast their ballot for a slate of Freethinkers.

The party’s list is headed by 42-year-old Andreas Kyriacou, who says it is time to tell politicians they must recognize that “there are a lot of non-religious people in their electorate.” He says he doesn’t believe his group will overcome the party machinery, but the mathematics make it appear feasible they will take a seat. And that, he says, “would be a victory indeed for humanists everywhere”.

The news surely comes as no surprise to politicians, many of whom, left and right, are not religious, but they keep their heads down, says Kyriacou. Parliament has a Bible study group, he notes, but no groups for non-religious MPs.

The Swiss Freethinkers argue that politicians continue to run scared of religious voters. The group includes agnostics, atheists, secularists, rationalists, skeptics and those who are just plain critics of religion.

“We, and probably a lot of Swiss people who have never thought about humanism or atheism, are tired of the influence the churches and religion still exert in this country,” he recently told Reuters after speaking at a “Denkfest”, or “Think Festival,” that the Swiss Freethinkers Association held in Zurich in September.

Zurich voters but also scientists, philosophers and even comedians from around the world attended the event.

Swiss politicians fail to take a stand on social issues like assisted suicide and abortion, where the Catholic church in particular has strong views, says Kyriacou, and on the powerful place of religion in education in parts of the country.

Swiss Freethinkers are not alone: there is growing determination among humanists and atheists on all five continents to make themselves more visible and their influence felt, as evidenced by conferences this year in Europe and elsewhere.

MOUNTING INTEREST IN FREETHINKING PHILOSOPHY

Delegates from India, Uganda, Nigeria, Argentina and Brazil, all countries where belief in a supreme deity or deities is strong, to the World Humanist Congress in Oslo in August, reported mounting interest in their philosophy.

They argue that morality is based in human nature and does not need a father-figure god to back it up with punishment in an afterlife, in which they do not believe.

Sonja Eggerickx, Humanist - Photo IHEU

“There are more godless groups in the world than ever before,” Sonja Eggerickx, a Belgian schools inspector who is president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, told the Congress.

US delegates included a serving army major who has just established an organization for atheists in the military. He spoke of a surge of rejection of religion in all its forms by young Americans, a point some recent opinion surveys back up.

British Humanists are one of the oldest groups and in Manchester in May they were told of a sharp rise in humanist birth, marriage and death ceremonies. The group’s four-year-old student wing is seeing strong growth.

The latest census in Ireland shows that atheists, agnostics and humanists are the largest group in the country after Catholics, the national humanists association president, Brian Whiteside, told a conference in August. Numbers were growing fast in the wake of the “pedophile priests” scandal, he told members from this country where the Catholic Church for decades dominated all areas of life, including politics and government decision-making.

In Nigeria, where people who are openly non-religious face Christian preacher-inspired public opprobrium as “immoral reprobates” or “Satanists” and in the Islamic north are treated as apostates, the humanist movement held its Congress in Abuja in September.

Its founder and chairman Leo Igwe, was once a seminarist. He set up the group 15 years ago and has helped form groups in Uganda and Malawi. He called on delegates to work for “a new age of Reason and Enlightenment” across Africa. Igwe has campaigned hard against the persecution (often with support from Christian-inspired preachers) and sometimes killing of “child witches”: children perceived to be possessed by the devil.

African humanists vocally defend gays and lesbians who are denounced as criminals and demonized in the popular media. The often do so at a high personal cost.

An Atheist University was founded in September in India, in the south-eastern city of Vijayawada.

And in Israel secularists who say they suffer from religious coercion despite a conviction that they represent a majority of the population, won a court ruling in early October that they cannot be forced to list Judaism as their religion.

In Muslim countries where renunciation of belief can be punished by death but always ends in social ostracism and persecution, the existence of an organisation of atheists is almost unthinkable, says Roy Brown of the IHEU.

But in Europe, an association of ex-Muslims is growing, with national chapters in several countries. Some British Asians who have abandoned the faith were in Oslo, and found themselves arguing with Islamists who came to picket the gathering.